Online vendors of products may vend products that have particular designs printed or otherwise applied on an underlying product. For example, a t-shirt vendor may sell t-shirts that may have different images, text, or other graphics applied thereon. Likewise, online printers may sell various business products such as postcards, notecards, etc., that have different image and/or text content printed thereon.
Many individuals, businesses, and organizations occasionally have a need to purchase a quantity of custom printed materials, such as birth announcements, party invitations, business cards, product or service brochures, promotional postcards, personalized holiday cards, or any number of other things. Many of these individuals and businesses turn to sources such as a local print shop while others rely on any of the various specialized software products available for purchase and installation on an appropriate computer system.
To provide an alternative to the above approaches, printing service providers, taking advantage of the capabilities of the Web and modern Web browsers, provide document design services for user's desiring to create customized documents from any computer with Web access at whatever time and place is convenient to the user. These service providers typically provide their customers with the ability to access the service provider's web site, view product templates, and enter information to create a customized markup language document. In a typical Web-based system, editing is usually limited to allowing the user to add, modify and position text and perhaps upload images for incorporation into the product design. After a document has been designed by the user, Web-based service providers also typically allow the user to place an order for the production and delivery to the user's home or business of quantities of high quality, printed documents of the type that the user is not capable of producing with the printer systems typically connected to most personal computer systems.
An online vendor of multiple products) each of which may be available with different graphical designs appearing thereon) may wish to market their products by grouping multiple products and offering them together as a bundled set or “kit”. Generally, a kit offer will include an offer of a lower price for purchasing the entire kit versus the price of purchasing each of the items in the kit individually.
Often, it is desirable to present and offer products together as kits when the design applied to each of the products in the kit appear to closely match one another. For example, in the example above where the vendor is an online provider of business cards, notecards, and other business-related promotional products, a consumer ordering such products may desire to present a coordinated look across all ordered products in order to build a brand for their business. Thus, the online product vendor would desirably offer kit configurations only for those products whose designs closely match one another. However, when an online vendor offers multiple products of different types and designs, there may not exist a matching design for each product in the kit configuration. Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a technique for dynamically generating a gallery containing only those available designs for a particular kit configuration for presentation to a customer.